Putting the Power in Your Hands: Montage Goes Open Source

The way news is gathered and reported is evolving every day. We live in the Age of Democratized Storytelling, where the relationship between gatekeepers and their audiences is fluid and news is produced with a thumb press.

That is why we launched Montage in April. We wanted to give journalists and human rights activists a collaborative tool to discover, curate and analyze YouTube videos. Conceived and developed in partnership with Jigsaw, Google’s tech incubator tackling geopolitical issues, Montage allows users to build projects that harness the power of YouTube’s many eyewitness sources to tell rich, impactful stories. Now more than 1,200 people are using the platform to find important videos, collaborate across time zones and borders, and tell great stories.

Today, we’re proud to take the next step. Montage is now open source and free to use under the Apache 2 open source license. Developers can access the code on GitHub here and via the link on the Montage landing page.

Content discovery on social platforms is elemental to journalism today. Montage allows users to search YouTube by time, date created, location and uploader. It also offers users a way to work together in real-time, adding tags, comments and locations to videos. Crucially, the platform gives journalists and analysts alike the ability to share collections of video content via the export function. All of these functionalities are unique to Montage and a powerful way to sift through and analyze footage around a specific story or event.

Montage builds on our commitment to innovative journalism and our belief that tech solutions can help make that journalism stronger. We look forward to seeing what technologists and journalists can do on Montage.

If you have a story you’d want to share or a question, please tweet at us @storyful.